Showstoppers FX Review

A few years ago I was at a videography seminar where the presenter demonstrated how to create a title where it appeared that the letters were being written on to the screen. The animation was done in After Effects and it was pretty complicated! Many of the attendees were very impressed and it looked pretty cool when it was all finished. But I remember that my brain hurt after watching all the steps, and I knew I’d never actually go through all that for an opening title.

Now there is a much easier solution...the Showstoppers FX Animation Construction Kit Series. While I personally steer away from effects such as this, I know there are many other videographers who will find this tool fabulous. I received the NTSC HD and SD kit which sells for $399.95 on the Showstoppers FX website. It is compatible with Final Cut Pro, Premiere 6.5, Premiere Pro, Premiere Elements, Liquid 6&7, Edius 4.5, and Vegas 6,7 and 8. I reviewed the SD title animations using Premiere Pro CS2 and the HD animations using Premiere Pro CS3. Both worked flawlessly.

In a nutshell, Showstoppers FX is a series of short animations of individual letters of the alphabet being written along with stills of each letter. There are supporting animations with a gold pen and wand that can be used if you want the effect to include such an instrument and ‘fairy sparkles’ or bubbles if you really want to make your title look like something from a Disney movie.

Basically you match up an animation of the letter you want and end it with a still (to keep the letter on screen). Each letter has an alpha channel layer, so you layer the letters and move them as needed to create your word. The instructions are very easy to follow and I actually was able to create a title in HD in about 10 minutes.
I tested this product using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 on a dual core 2.41Ghz system with 3GB RAM and a Matrox RTx2.

The title I created (Chris & Laura) took 11 layers and about 2 minutes to render. If you want to add in the pen or the Disney Princess Fairy Dust (Sparkles), all you have to do is add more layers and copy and paste your motion attributes. On my system with the Matrox RTx2, adding the sparkles and magic wand expanded the timeline to 33 layers and took about 10 minutes to render.

Also included in the kit are some “Bonus Words” that may be commonly used in wedding and even videos such as “Our”, “Wedding”, “Bat Mitzvah”, and “Preparations”. Each bonus word includes the pen, wand, sparkles and bubble animations too. You can also change the color easily by using your NLE’s color correction tool. I’ve included a still frame using the Bonus Word “Wedding” with the sparkles, bubbles and wand all added and made it sort of pink. It was very simple to do.

So while this is a product that I would never use, I do have to give it a good grade because it was easy to use, worked well, and is high quality.